Yes indeed, you read that right: progress!

Sorry, did I make you choke on your cuppa? I know, I know, but sometimes miracles happen and they take us all by surprise when they do.

There has been some slow, but real, progress on Pearls of Wisdom in the last couple of weeks.

(For those joining the class late, Pearls of Wisdom is my latest large Work In Progress. Except for some time it’s mostly been a Work Sitting Looking Sad And Desperate For Some Love. But y’know, WSLSADFSL just doesn’t have the same ring to it as WIP.)

Pearls of Wisdom stars mermaids – five of them, doing various finny things underwater (duh!) off the coast of Cornwall, sharing their watery home with local marine fauna. A mature mermaid, filled with the wisdom of her hundred years of so of living, dispenses advice to the young ones, one of whom has unexpectedly noticed us voyeurs watching from our bathysphere*.

(Well, I suppose we could be diving instead, but then I wouldn’t get to use such a luscious word as bathysphere, and that would suck. Because it makes me happy just saying it. Bathysphere. Weird? I am not!)

This is a big piece, the biggest I’ve made in this style, five feet square. Which is giving me all sorts of challenges just by itself. And then there’s the fact that unlike previous work, it’s not actually going to be a quilt at all – by any definition. More like an appliquéd and embroidered picture. More new challenges.

So, what have I got so far?

A sketchbook full of research, ideas, notes and drawings. Colour notes, research on marine life off the Southwest coast, gesture drawings, and even a construction plan. Hooray!

A full size cartoon on paper laying out composition. It was on my living room wall, but the damn thing keeps falling off, so it’s been banished for now. But I’ll need it out again when I start enlarging.

A dyed and painted background of fine cotton mounted on medium canvas that should stand up to heavy stitching and stretching on bars. To be honest, this has been the biggest pain so far. So damn big. Keeping it smooth while spray basting it to the canvas was tricky, and then when I pressed it, the canvas started peeling off. Argh! So it still needs some more work to smooth out those ripples before I stitch the canvas down around the edges. Fabric! Some days I long for a nice simple piece of paper or board that stays where it’s put.

A mature mermaid drawing ready to be projected, enlarged and transferred onto fabric. I’ve redrawn her several times; still not entirely happy but you have to stop sometime, and she will still evolve as she’s painted on fabric and then stitched. Her tail in particular is going to be heavily stitched and embellished with metallic paints. I decided to give her a fishy tale rather than a whale or dolphin flipper. Why? It seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m not so sure now, but what the hell.

A surprised mermaid girl, also ready to be projected, enlarged and transferred to fabric. This is a scary one to create, because she’s the focal point for the whole piece. I was very worried about her and took ages looking for a photo to use for a model, but last week I suddenly knew what to use, and to be honest, I really like her. (She’s bald because her hair will be added separately, not because mermaids look like eggs. Silly.)

I’m always trying to distort the human faces and bodies I take as models because the creatures I depict aren’t meant to look exactly like us. So this mermaid has large eyes (because it’s pretty dark underwater) and a flattened nose (because she doesn’t use it much) and I hope the distortion of a very close up lens gives the impression of a face coming up close to look at us. Have you ever been to one of those underwater viewing galleries at an aquarium where there are belugas or other whales? And they swim up really close to look at the crazy humans staring at them? That’s what I was aiming for.

What else have I got? Actually, um… er… that’s about it.

But it’s more than I had a week ago, so yay me.

Organised people look away now. I would hate to cause you a fainting fit. And I’m all out of smelling salts.

This is where I mention that the deadline for this piece is, um, the end of March… I think?

And, did I also mention that it’s BIG? With FIVE mermaids and sea creatures and lots of appliqué and machine embroidery?

But you know, Queen of Last Minute Panics here, so hey, what’s the problem? Loads of time still.

*Pointless Trivia: When Otis Barton and William Beebe made their world record descent in a bathysphere Off Bermuda in 1935, the naturalist Beebe described a world filled with bioluminescent creatures so bizarre and beautiful that many refused to believe him. Of course, we now know that he’d fallen through a wormhole and landed on Pandora.

Tagged as: mermaids, pointless trivia